It jerks him back to reality. He reminds himself this quest is not his alone, that he has no right to dwell on fear. Fear is his grandfather’s province, real fear in the face of life-threatening dangers. Raphe sucks in his breath: if he won’t act on behalf of his grandfather, no one else will. Yet with Laura Lewin sitting just inches away from him, no amount of logic will alter the fact that enemies should feel different from her. When it comes to the real, very much alive Laura Lewin, Raphe simply does not want to shoulder his responsibilities.
‘What do you think?’ he says again, trying to grasp a new determination.‘ Was your father hiding something?’
Laura begins to speak, so slowly that it seems to Raphe she’s deciding with each word whether to continue. She says she doesn’t believe her father ever revealed the whole story – a long pause – but he resisted all her attempts to discover more. A longer pause now, and Raphe already sparring with his own demons doesn’t need to put up with impatience as well. He wants to drag the words out of her. But he remains silent, he does not even look at her, just wills her to continue.
The road is very high at this point, the plunge to the ocean sharper than ever, and it occurs to Raphe that he is as much at Laura’s mercy as she drives this precarious Australian coast as his grandfather was with her father in that wood outside Belsen. For a moment the possibility is terrifyingly real, then the road widens and bends briefly inland. The word ‘mercy’ lingers; it strikes him as peculiarly un-Jewish.
‘My own investigations,’ Laura says, ‘small as they were, suggested there was more to be learned.’ She checks the rear-vision mirror and slows the car down. ‘But my father’s gone now and,’ there’s a slight hesitation, ‘I suppose I’m resolved to let him have the last word.’
She pulls in at a scenic observation point and stops the car. She’s picking at a knob of loose plastic on the steering wheel. ‘I loved my father,’ her voice is no more than a murmur.‘I loved him enough to accept his version of his life, even though I knew –’ Raphe leans forward, a small interrogative explosion escaping his lips. ‘Oh yes,’ she continues, ‘I always knew we didn’t have the whole truth. But it was, after all, his life. And who needs to know the almost unthinkable? Who can afford to remember it? I never wanted to force that on my father.’
She’s lucky to have had the choice, Raphe is thinking. He swallows the bile and forces himself to listen as she tells about her so-small investigations, how there was no record of her father ever having worked in labour camps.
‘And now I’ve stopped searching,’ she says.‘Both my parents are dead, I’ve never had any grandparents, my brother’s thrown in his lot with the meshuggeners, I can’t afford to lose any more.’
There follows a long silence, with Laura still nagging at the knob of plastic and Raphe assaulted by questions and objections, and through it all a mess of fear, self-pity, resentfulness, envy and, as much as he would prefer otherwise, fatigue. At forty-three years of age Raphe finds himself a psychiatrist’s delight, when all he wants is to do his duty by his grandfather and get on with his life.
Longing is such an effective gauge of a person’s value and how Raphe has longed for his grandfather. If only, he used to think, longing were sufficient to disinter the dead. But now, high above a lethal coast, sitting with the daughter of his enemy in a car buffeted by stiff southern winds, he wishes there were someone else to take on his grandfather, just for a short time, to give Raphe a break: a trouble-shooter for the psyche, a Freud in the field.
He starts with a touch, her hand on his shoulder. Feels it through his clothes. A touch which pulls him into the present and spirals clean through him, a touch which spills onto his skin in a flood of hot prickles. A touch which, whether he likes it or not, blots out the old pains.
‘Look,’ she says.‘Take a look at this magnificent view.’
He gazes through the windscreen and sees where he is. Not simply a lethal coastline, nor a succession of threatening cliffs, but a brazenly beautiful stretch of clay-coloured crags and broad bleached sand. A coastline ringed with a wide collar of whitest foam, and beyond that the endless green of a wintry sea.
Her hand is still on his shoulder. He looks at her, she is not his Holocaust, she simply cannot be his Holocaust.
He makes himself smile, ‘It’s almost as good as Big Sur,’ and notes the relief in his voice.
Laura stifles her laughter. Raphe Carter: academic, writer, volcano lover, Jew, American, and of them all the American clearly dominates. She smiles back at him, and the tensions of a moment ago are fortunately gone and in their place a ferocious hunger.
She starts the car and follows the coast a little further where the road dips to sea level. Within a few minutes she and Raphe are propped on a rug in the shelter of some low dunes just a few metres from the breaking waves. They had stopped at the Victoria Market before leaving Melbourne – food heaven, Laura had promised – but with Raphe clearly more interested in hygiene than food (‘Nothing’s covered in plastic,’ he kept saying) she’d gone ahead with a selection to suit herself. And it’s a veritable feast, she decides, as she spreads out the food.
‘Not too cold?’ Laura asks, and seeing he is, pulls off her scarf and gives it to him.
For the next hour or so, and despite the cold, they sit together on the wintry beach, dipping into the food, talking, laughing, arguing, and now and then retreating into their own thoughts.
At one point Raphe asks about Daniel and the religious choices he has made. Laura says she feels his loss much like an amputation, that she’s aware of a shadow, an echo of how he used to be at the same time as she mourns his absence. She talks about feeling so powerless. He’s the one who’s deserted, she says, he’s the one who’s rejecting her, and she hates it, hates what he has taken from her.
She slurps a fat oyster from its shell.‘He’s lucky it’s not pork.’
Yet even as she speaks she realises how ridiculous she sounds. Just as Daniel’s dietary laws will not make one iota of difference to his rewards from God, neither will her denial of those same laws have any effect on her brother’s behaviour. It’s just that she misses him so much.
‘I see him passing his life in a capsule, like those bubble babies you read about. So safe and sterile, but the outside world will get him in the end.’ She adds some smoked salmon and dill cucumber to a crust of rye and takes a hefty bite. She chews long and slowly. ‘I’ve as much in common with a Jewish fundamentalist like my brother as I have with a Muslim fundamentalist, and each of them, incidentally, would have far more in common with each other than either would have with me. In fact, throw in a Christian fundamentalist, and you’d have the ultimate triumvirate, one with a nasty penchant for violence.’
Raphe’s response surprises her. While he agrees with everything she says, he also believes that if she wants a brother she’ll have to accept his choices,‘As he has accepted yours. I’m sure a lesbian sister was not on his agenda.’
And while it’s true, Daniel has always accepted her lesbianism, it’s now tainted by his lack of acceptance of the non-Jewishness of her partner. Although her brother’s acceptance is not the main issue.
‘Daniel’s religious cohorts wouldn’t accept me,’ she says.
‘But that’s no reason to sink to their level.’
And the two of them burst out laughing. Something quite humorous about secular Jewish Laura being morally superior to the extreme orthodox.
And yet it isn’t humorous, nothing about her brother’s religious choices is humorous. ‘His choices are downright dangerous, and not just for him but for all Jews,’ Laura says.‘Observance has never saved anyone, it just makes you more obvious. More vulnerable too. All that communication exclusively with your own kind and the group never takes a critical view of itself, never tries to understand itself in relation to anyone else.’ She slurps down another oyster. ‘My brother and his mates are making it impossible for diverse people to live together.’
Raphe is quick to re
spond. ‘But these sort of orthodox don’t want to live with people who are different from themselves. They don’t want diversity and pluralism. And they certainly don’t want the likes of you.’ He leans forward and touches the side of her face, a fleeting moment and then he is sitting back again leaving her with his touch on her cheek. ‘But this doesn’t alter the fact that Daniel’s your brother, and if you want a brother then you’ll have to make some concessions for him.’
A short time later they start for home. They have only travelled a few kilometres when Raphe indicates an uncleared area stretching inland from the road.
‘I can’t visit Australia and not experience the bush,’ he says.
Laura pulls in at a narrow opening near a walking track and the two of them rug up and head off. She is happy for a walk, happy to slough off the familiar conflicts of her brother and enjoy the unexpected comforts of this new friend. The trees shelter them from the wind; she takes in the fresh, wet smell and the rustling of branches, the squelching of their boots and the crash of distant waves.And she takes in Raphe, his presence so strong that the side of her nearest to him is scratchy and hot. He has such a strange effect on her. There have been times during the past few days when she has felt so close to him that if someone were to prod him she would know the pressure, so close that when he has begun a sentence she could finish it. Indeed, the connection has been so pronounced that if she believed in reincarnation she would think they had met in a previous life. Then in a moment the harmony will disappear and there’ll be the sharp bite of his interrogation about her father. And in another moment, the knowing empathy about her brother. So many moods, yet invariably intense. And exciting too, in a strangely charged yet strangely disturbing way, like being back in high school with a secret crush on one of the boys. She finds it all rather peculiar.
If there were something feminine about him she might better understand, but there is not. He is much the same height as she, shortish for a man, tallish for a woman, a neat, caramel-coloured man. She likes his compactness, his firmness, or at least she thinks he would feel firm, is tempted to touch and stops herself just in time. It’s odd to be so aware of him physically and certainly not her usual response to a man, not her usual response to a woman come to that, and moves ever so slightly away.
Such a careful distance now between them, and is he aware of it too? Again she is reminded of high school ditherings: does he like me as much as I like him? And a flickering through her like wings she has not felt since the early days with Nell. He seems happy to walk in silence, and while he looks to be quite composed, perhaps he, too, is experiencing the same jangling as she is. She hopes so. And quickly stifles the thought, all these peculiar thoughts. Not what she wants to be thinking, a self-respecting, permanently partnered lesbian who has happily left her heterosexual days far in the past. She manoeuvres her attention to the bush, the slender, blue-grey eucalypts, the dripping ferns, the wombat hollows, but her body tugs her back to less environmentally sensitive topics. It’s their conversation, she decides. They talk so closely, so intensely, and not the first time she has experienced the arousal of words. For there is something indisputably erotic bridging that careful distance between them. It was there on the beach as well; in fact, several times this past week she’s been aware of it. And a pleasure in watching him, in hearing the soft nasality of his speech, even in his smell, a faintly herbal aroma.
And all because of the intensity of their talk? Who does she think she’s fooling. And exactly on cue, there’s a peal of laughter from a pair of kookaburras.
‘Look,’ Raphe says, stopping on the track.‘Look, two of them, up there on the branch and having such a good time.’
‘Laughing at us, I bet,’ Laura says, laughing herself.
‘Oh I hope so, I do hope so,’ he says.
Such a sweet man, she finds herself thinking, earnest but very sweet. And as disturbing as these feelings might be, they’re far preferable to anything she has experienced with Nell these past couple of months. She is enjoying Raphe’s company, not anything she can really explain, and neither, she suddenly realises, does she care. He’s an unexpected gift, something in addition to the rest of her life, and very grateful she is too.
‘May I hold your hand?’
She stops, so deep in her own thoughts, and wonders if she’s heard correctly.
Then said again.‘May I hold your hand?’
The moment is magically prolonged. She is forty-three years old, has done a good deal more sex than she ever needed to do, and here is a grown man asking if he can hold her hand. It’s like hitting the jackpot at spin the bottle, and there you are paired with the only boy in the room without pimples and adolescent whiskers. She is blushing and confused and very aware of his maleness, not as something to avoid, but as a beacon of erotic light. And a sense of intimacy far greater than if he suggested they go to bed together.
She wipes her palm against her jeans and puts her hand in his, and the two of them walk hand in hand down the track. She moves in closer, or perhaps he does, better to establish a shared rhythm. Her arm brushes against his coat, against his torso, and with it a charge as if they were suddenly naked and his skin grazing hers, that clutching in the blood, that squeezing deep inside. The initial unease quickly falls away as she becomes utterly rolled into this man whose voice, whose language, whose entire presence is pulling her closer and closer. That and the warm, slightly sticky grasp of his hand.
For ten minutes they walk, hands clasped, without speaking. She has no idea what he is thinking but hopes he feels as knotted to her as she does to him. If she could see into his face she might know, but she does not dare disturb their rhythm by even a glance. The track rises higher; every now and then they catch a glimpse of the sea. They’re walking the edge of the world and Laura happy to take this moment out of time and prolong it for as long as possible, when they are suddenly brought to a halt by a fallen log.
They could clamber over and continue along the track, but nightfall is not far away. She sees him glance at his watch, he knows it is late. They sit together on the log, neither of them saying a word; her hand feels cold without his touch and she wants him to take it again. You’re a grown woman, she tells herself, if you want to hold his hand go ahead and do it. But something about that request of his: may I hold your hand, makes her not presume.
They are half a body length from each other, his breathing has quickened. It occurs to her that with a cigarette and a glass of wine they might well be postcoital, and in the next moment she changes her mind. There is an energy between them, and a tugging curiosity, but it’s not like lovers, not like soon-to-be lovers either. It is as if she and Raphe are diving far out in the ocean, using only the quiet hush of snorkels. Underwater and together in a world utterly beyond imagining, floating together in a closed, muted, sensual wonderland. And why this man and these sensations, she cannot explain, but for one day in an otherwise stormy month, she decides not to interfere.
It was dusk when they arrived back at the car. They were both very cold and content to sit in the warming cabin wrapped in their own thoughts. Raphe in particular, who couldn’t believe he was falling for a woman whose father had been responsible for so much harm to his family, a woman for whom he had travelled half the world in order to seek retribution. But he had been desperate to touch her, had wanted to all week. Five small words: may I hold your hand, just the touch of a hand when he yearned for so much more, five small words requiring several minutes’ rehearsal, and then: to hell with it. But this was not what he wanted, not what he had come to Australia for. It was not that his eye was drifting off the ball, it was more he had stumbled onto the wrong playing field. Yet he couldn’t stop himself.
As they walked hand in hand through the bush, he had let his mind fly. He had imagined the weight of her breasts, the swell of her hips, the slither of skin, the stroke of her nipples down his chest. He imagined cupping her face in his hands, twisting his fingers through her hair, tasting the cool-hot
damp of her mouth, entwining those long lithe legs with his. And even while he was soaking in his thoughts, he knew what a fool he was being. On the way back to the car and no longer hand in hand, he shook his mind free of her body but not free of her, and found himself wondering how she lived, the style of her house, the pictures on her walls, the books on her shelves, the colours of her furnishings, the indoor fountain she had mentioned. Even her cat, Wystan, he wanted to meet the cat and he didn’t even like cats. And long before they reached the car he had seized her hand again, grabbing even a flicker of that body he had imagined so vividly.
Now as they made their way along the twisted road back to the city, Raphe held himself as far from her as possible and forced himself to see reason. He had once read that when family members were separated – siblings when young, or parents from their babies – then met up later in life, often a sexual relationship sprang up. The desire was there even though it should not be. And so too with him and Laura: a desire where it did not belong. And while it felt as good as any desire he had ever known, he had a job to do. He did not know exactly what he planned, but for the moment he needed to get away from her before he lost his way completely. So when Laura asked about his movements for the next few days, he told her he would be leaving early in the week for the Philippines to see one of his favourite volcanoes, and then would be flying home.
His leaving seemed to have no impression on her whatsoever, but not so the volcano.
‘One day before I die I’d love to see one,’ she said. ‘I expect volcanoes remind you who you are.’
Laura dropped Raphe off at his city hotel and drove home through Fitzroy. At seven o’clock on a Saturday night the Brunswick Street cafés were filling fast. The footpaths were flush with strolling flâneurs of the twenty-first century variety, and Laura tempted to join the throng, although only fat cats and parking attendants ever found a car parking space in Brunswick Street. Besides, she wanted to be strolling with Nell.
The Prosperous Thief Page 30
